The Jaisalmeri is the finest of India’s camel breeds prized for speed, strength, and stamina, trained along the Pakistan border to carry contraband alone across two hundred kilometres of dunes, capable of sensing approaching patrols and dropping soundlessly into the sand until the danger passes. It is the only breed that can go from sitting to a full gallop in one motion. A tested Jaisalmeri commands top dollars.
Fakeera bred and trained such camels. He spoke little, smiled even less, and had the self-possession of someone who had spent a lifetime measuring words against the desert. The three animals he brought for this trip carried a lighter cargo than his stock ever did: two brothers, and the years between us and himself.
Ravi was my younger brother and an ornithologist who had spent years following disappearing birds across disappearing landscapes including the Lesser Florican in the monsoon grasslands, the Bengal Florican in the northern terai, and out here, the most endangered of the three cousins, the Great Indian Bustard. He was hypersensitive about the land he worked on, the way people become about things they’ve watched disappear. Nothing got under his skin more than someone clumsily walking over that terrain, impervious to how little of it was left.
Most of us, especially those of us living in urban areas, are brought up understanding the time value of money but very few of us truly understand the timeless value of landscapes. Ravi understood both and, more importantly, that the people who lived in such landscapes were the ones who’s way of life, customs, practices, and traditions tread lightly on such landscapes. Tap into that understanding, and you come away blessed. Perhaps it was for that reason, to give me a chance to learn it firsthand, that he always made it a point to plan a trek in each of the landscapes he worked in.
This one started in a village west of Jaisalmer, past even the Sum dunes that most people came to see. Our plan was simple: Ravi, Fakeera and I were to ride camels as the elders did, a camel hair blanket as saddle, no gadgetry, no packed foods. A burlap roll, with vertical pockets to hold basic provisions, was all that each of us carried. Bajra ka roti, ghee, jaggery and chillies were the staple diet, with camel milk for tea. We were to live off the land with our camels and navigate the way they did. I was told that the last time anyone had taken a camel from that village to the Pushkar mela, over 600 kms away, was around the time of Partition, a crossing the elders still spoke of, in twelve days. Ours was to take eleven, at the pace Fakeera gave us at dawn on the first morning and never once revised.
At the Sum dunes, Kudo Khan ran a tea stall that saw everything before anyone told him about it. Ravi had known him for years, and the evening before we left, he took me to meet him. We sat on the ground and made the kind of easy, laughing small talk that fills the time before the real questions arrive. When it came, it came to Ravi and concerned the route. Ravi said that we were going to use the traditional pagdandis, the old dune paths, partly because there was no faster way through, partly because the trek doubled as a survey, a chance to map how far the Great Indian Bustard’s range had shrunk since anyone last checked.
Then Kudo Khan turned to me and asked where I was from. Bombay, I said. He looked at me the way men who don’t waste words look at other men, and said to Ravi: Bhai saab, you and Fakeera will manage. Your elder brother’s body will not last two days in the saddle. Before either of them could answer, I did. My voice came out lower and steadier than I expected: Kudo Khan, this is not about the body, it’s about what sits above it. I will finish the trek. And I’ll come back and have tea with you.
The laughter disappeared. Nobody spoke. Then, whether it was the grimness or the bravado, Kudo Khan started laughing, and everyone followed his lead, and the evening loosened back into the kind it had been before the question came. We left his stall in good spirits, certain the next morning would start well.
I had never ridden a camel before that morning. Rising from a sitting position to standing is one stomach-churning thing. Rising straight into a gallop is another altogether. My body did not care what an achievement it was; it only knew that it feels as though your heart has been left somewhere behind while the rest of you is thrown violently forward. Ravi went up as if his camel were a chair. Fakeera didn’t seem to notice he had risen at all. Unlike horses, camels don’t have stirrups. Your feet dangle. Your groin takes the strain. Ravi and Fakeera were habitual riders. I was not. By the time we made camp that first evening, the skin from my lower back to both my legs had split, bled, and turned completely raw.
The pain was excruciating, unbearable, and pure agony. We rode ten hours a day. My legs turned numb. Dragged off my camel each evening, I would be dropped on my stomach, stripped, washed, dusted generously with antiseptic powder. And then a miracle. By the third day I woke pain-free. The rawness and the bleeding that made me waddle like a duck were still there but the pain had vanished. Fakeera checked the loads that morning, glanced at me, and said nothing, which from him passed for acknowledgment. Ravi said even less. There was nothing left for either of them to say; they had been reading it off me for two days already.
By the fifth day, the desert stopped looking like an obstacle. Fakeera would point without slowing — a shift in the sand’s colour that meant water once stood there, a line of thorn scrub bent by a wind I couldn’t feel yet but he already felt. He never explained twice. If you missed it, you missed it. Riding behind Ravi, I began to understand what he’d meant all those years complaining about careless feet on fragile ground; how much there was to miss if you weren’t looking, and how much a person could ruin simply by not looking.
Sometime during the seventh day, I stopped experiencing the riding as something being done to me; I had begun to anticipate the rise before it came, to move with the fall instead of against it. Fakeera let me lead that afternoon. It changed nothing about the route. It changed something else, a small transfer of trust from a man who did not hand it out to be polite.
It wasn’t until the ninth day that the land turned harder, more exposed, the kind of terrain Ravi had spent years learning to cross without leaving a mark on it. That night, for the first time, I helped with the loads before anyone asked. I no longer had to be told.
We came in on the eleventh day, over six hundred kilometres from where we’d started, at the same gait that hadn’t changed once across eleven days. At the end of that day I got off on my own, removed the blankets from the back of my camel, and brushed him myself. I was on top of the world. I felt like a man of the desert.
Somewhere behind us, on a stretch of dune we’d already crossed, Kudo Khan’s doubt had been answered. I knew now, brushing down an animal that had carried me, that I had no right to move through this country carelessly. Ravi hadn’t said a word the entire trip about what he did for a living, what these habitats meant, what a careless foot could undo in a place like this. He had simply put me on the back of a camel for eleven days and let the desert make the argument for him. I had earned, at whatever cost to my own skin, the right to move through his landscape the way he did: without a mark, without a word. It was the only conversation we ever had about his work, and the only one that mattered.
Many years later, I went back to the Sum dunes. Fakeera was out with a tourist group somewhere on the sand, they told me. A boy leading a camel by its rope offered to take me to Kudo Khan’s tea hut instead. He looked surprised that I even knew the name. I asked if I could ride the camel myself, and he refused outright, camels were temperamental, he said, and I wouldn’t manage. He led me the whole way by rope, as though I had no business on a camel at all.
Kudo Khan came out of the hut before we arrived, drawn by his own name being called. He took one look at me on the camel, being led like a first-timer, and cuffed the boy across the head. Do you know who this is? he shouted. This is the pardesi who rode with Fakeera to Pushkar. He sat me down before I could say a word and called for tea. Word travels fast on sand: other cameleers began drifting toward the hut, and Kudo Khan told the story of that evening before we left — the tea stall, the question of my body, my answer — to anyone who hadn’t heard it, and to several who plainly had. I let the tea go cold in my hands and let the years settle around me. A city boy had found another home.
Fakeera came racing on his camel, having heard I was there. He threw himself at me before I’d even managed to climb down, sobbing, laughing, talking too fast for anyone to interrupt. Desert people are poor of money but rich of heart. Something in that landscape makes them astute instead — slow, deliberate, cautious. They don’t make friends easily, but once they do, the friendship never breaks. Their blood runs thick with iron, Fakeera always said. It was that iron, I understood standing in his grip that afternoon, he had clearly counted more carefully than I ever had — city life trains us out of feeling, or at least out of showing. Somewhere in our life we have lost that which makes any of it worthwhile.
I am back on a camel, leading a small, delighted cavalcade of cameleers up onto the dune to watch the sun go down over ground I had once bled across. That night we sat around a fire retelling the eleven days as though none of us had lived them the first time, under more stars than any city sky admits to. I no longer knew where the journey had ended.